Joomla 1.5 Features

A. User features

1. Administrator

Managers

• Extension manager
– unified installer
– ability to disable components (security)

• Article manager
– content items are now called articles
– only uses one editor to save screen realestate
– new image manager that allows u to insert images on the fly
– simplified interface
– on the fly-preview (u donÂ’t need to save first before u can preview your changes)
– archive functionality has been moved into the article manager
– improved pagebreak and readmore handling

• Menu manager
– set a default menu item
– three-click process to add a new menu item
– easily edit a menu item without the need to remove it
– u can link to anything
– vastely simplified interface

• Media manager
– Improved user interface, thumbnail and detail views
– Easily upload multiple files at once
– Added configuration settings

• Template manager
– Improved template preview, show module positions and names
– Support to edit multiple css files

2. Site

• Full support for feeds (atom 1.0 and rss 2.0); In Joomla! 1.5 feeds
  are generated for all article categories and sections, weblinks and
  contacts.
• Improved error handling; Joomla! 1.5 outputs correct 404, 403 and
  500 error messages. These message can be customised by the template
  designer.
• Improved lost password handling; Joomla! 1.5 makes it easier for
  users to retrieve their lost pasword based on username or email address.

B. Designer features

1. Introduction

Accessibility in Joomla! and Mambo has always been a much debated
topic. It an area that covers lots of different issues and as a result
it means different things to different people. The major issues that
are discussed frequently on the forums are:

• hardcoded tables in Joomla! code
• unflexible SEF (search engine friendly URLs) solution
• different issues with metadata (keywords, description and site titles)
• compliance to different accessibility standards (508, WCAG, Â….)

These issues have been adressed in the design and accessibilty
workgroup and most, if not all, of these issues can be solved within
the new 1.5 framework. In this paragraph we will shortly describe the
features that have been built into the 1.5 framework.

2. Accessibility in 1.5

Accessibility is a topic that much depends on the clientÂ’s demands,
the goals of the website designer, the audience of the site etcÂ… It
seems there is no one solution-fits-all. This awareness made us shift
strategy from ‘putting it all in the core’ to ‘making sure designers
can do it themselvesÂ’. This approach is exactly what we did when we
developed the framework; for Joomla! 1.5 we have done the following :

1. All html output has been moved into extension templates. These
templates can be overridden in your own site template, allowing a
designer to completely change the generated html markup to his liking.
He can change css classes, remove tables, make the template compliant
to accessibility standards etcÂ…
2. A designer can define his own module wrappers in his site
template. In 1.0 there were only 3 hardcoded options, in 1.5 a designer
can define his own option to wrap his modules.
3. The menu module in 1.5 now renders as unordered lists by
default, the old menutypes are still supported for backwards
compatability reasons.
4. The pagination output can be overriden in the site template by a designer.
5. The whole SEF system has been revamped. The core SEF support has
been improved and can easily be extended by plugins. No core hacking is
needed.

What does this all mean? In 1.5, a designer can change every little
bit of html the system generates, the standard output however is still
the same as in 1.0 to retain backwards compatibility with 1.0 site
templates. This allows the creation of accessible, standard compliant,
tableless, whatever-the-designer-thinks-is-important, websites.

We are currently trying to create a semantic site template that will
act as a proof of concept to demonstrate how people can use the new
features in 1.5. The goal is also to make this template an offical
package. Template designers can then use it as the basis for their own
accessible and standard compliant templates. The template will be
fine-tuned based on feedback gathered from the community and the idea
is to move it into the core for 2.0.

C. Developer features

1. Internationalisation

A lot of effort has been put into internationalisation. The framework offers the following additional features:

• Full UTF-8; It is able to represent any universal character in the
  Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character
  assignments for UTF-8 is coincident with ASCII (requiring little or no
  change for software that handles ASCII but preserves other values). For
  these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for
  email, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or
  streamed.

• RTL support; This option stands for Right To Left support, simple
  making it possible to reverse rendering order of content. This is
  option is valuable for languages where right to left is used, like
  Arabic.
• Translation using INI files; Translations of extensions is now fully supported within the core framework by INI files.
• Very easy to add new languages because of INI structure.

2. Application framework

Libraries

• FTP filesystem; Allows admins/users to maintain their site without
  having an ftp server/client around, ease of use and maximum flexibilty
• LDAP support; with this you can connect Joomla! to an enterprise
  directory like MicrosoftÂ’s Active Directory or NovellÂ’s e-directory;
  move credentials maintenance outside the Joomla! environment.
• New PDF library
– more powerful
– flexible
– more performant
– now fully OO based, fits perfectly into the framework
– images now are included when rendered
• XML-RPC support; this enables us to make the Joomla! CMS webservice
  aware and is opening up all kind of new functionality that can be
  incorporated into Joomla!

3rd party extensions

• Component framework; adding MVC pattern support offering a basic
  approach to develop full OO based extensions to Joomla! All classes to
  support easy, quick and almost out-of-the-box extensions development
  are around.
• Standard separation from logic and representation.
• Pathway support.
• Improved SEF
Now supported by plugin extension, no need to do core hacking.
Only limited by the needs of the end-user/developer.
• Improved caching
– general improvement of caching mechanism, speeding up website performance
– Implemented template caching.
– Implemented extensions caching (component, module, plugin etc.)
– Improved page caching.

• Database drivers;
Foundation layer for independent database support.
Core framework does not need to be changed when new RDBMS will be
added in future (maybe some refactoring of queries needs to be done
then).

3. Extendibility

Extendibility was one of the major design goals of Joomla! 1.5. By
no means it is needed to doa core hack when you want to add
functionality. The framework holds a very powerful mechanism for the
extendibilty; The New event-driven plugin framework.

• User authentication;
If you want to replace the standard way Joomla! does user
authentication, you can catch this event and implement it through the
plugin system.
GMail and LDAP authentication is implemented this way.
Also very useful for bridging solutions.
• User synchronisation; If you have a separate user source, you can synchronise user credentials in a very easy way.
– Extending through the plugin logic.
– Also very useful for bridging solutions.

• XML-RPC integration; Enabling web-services for the Joomla!
  framework. J!Explorer is a nice example that enables the power of this
  extendibility option.

4. Simplicty

• Simplified user interface;
– Re-organisation of logical menu items.
– Brand new admin template.
– Ajax in the installer simplifying the installation process.
• Unified installer;
– Upload, select a directory or direct url to install extensions.
– No need to select extension type, installer determines which type
of extension is installed and does the job with a one-click install.
• Reduced choices;
– For instance, interface design of content editing is simplified dramatically.
– Unified logic centered at one location, for example; all extensions information in one menu item.

5. Templates

In short the features can be described as follows:

• Integration of patTemplate for the site templates; Adding incredible flexibility in building form, pages etc. etc.
• Complete separation of logic and output; This option enables new
  features like a PDA alike output without adjusting functional logic.
• Accessibility improvements
• Template parameters; Offering full control to templete developers (and of course) users to overide any part of the web-page.

6. Backwards compatibility

Info about migration can be found in this blog post : dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/p,107/

Joomla! 1.5 has been build to deliver a smooth migration path to the
next generation Joomla! versions and for that it holds backwards
compatibility for previous versions in the 1.0 release. We have been
testing a lot of 3rd party extensions, most of them will work without
pain in 1.5, but there are also some 3rd par ty components that need a
fix. The backwards compatibilty requirements have led to a Joomla!
version that will not hold certain functional logic that a lot of
community users and 3rd party developers are asking, especially some of
the features researched in the Joomla! Google Summer Of Code event will
be included in the 2.0 release which has no development schedule set
currently.

Source for information (dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,33/p,201)